


the drift goes both ways

by heixicanadragon



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, POV Character of Color, POV Female Character, Sloppy Makeouts, code-switching, mako tops raleigh and raleigh likes it the end, yeahhhh gurl get it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-27
Updated: 2014-02-27
Packaged: 2018-01-13 18:41:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1236946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heixicanadragon/pseuds/heixicanadragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In response to the prompt "Paint Me": a drabble about one character drawing a picture of another [like one of your french girls~ be it painting them or drawing them, maybe offering a picture of them as a gift, feel free to specify.] </p><p>Mako is using Raleigh's butt as a couch cushion when they decide to make out like teenagers and try not to spiral too deeply into the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the drift goes both ways

**Author's Note:**

> Japanese is indicated by brackets.

The drift had given Mako Mori enough background into her partner’s history and disposition that what she hadn’t picked up from memories that floated to the surface in the jaeger she now found pretty easy to extrapolate from existing data and then confirm only with a question or two. Since coming back to her, to New Tokyo, Raleigh was always delighted by this skill of Mako’s—sometimes he could only break into the widest, most wondering grin when she asked him what she felt to any other person in any other company would be too probing a question, especially after so long a separation with so much change between them, and Mako guessed that expression was the closest she had seen to one of unalloyed happiness. 

When he looked at her like that, a sharp beast tended to claw up from her chest into her throat. Things like unalloyed happiness scared her nowadays. 

They had always been rare.

One thing that she knew about Raleigh was that he had grown up toting cheap cameras around (polaroids when he was really young, before they got expensive and hipster, or those old 35mm single-use cameras from the drugstore that clicked cheaply under your fingers)—and later, once tech had advanced enough to saturate the market, he’d had cellphones—taking snapshots of whatever struck his fancy, collecting the pictures of things he’d seen and things he wanted to remember, images to carry with him. 

When he’d gotten older and started earning money from odd jobs, he’d saved up for what he called ‘a proper camera’ and started getting pictures developed. In his spare time as a teenager, even without having taken any formal photography classes, he was often charming his way into the school’s dark room or messing with the communication arts digital lab’s laser printers’ settings to see how high their quality could go. That was about the time that he started collecting prints of his favorite photos to hang on the walls of whatever room he was living in at the time.

War and the aftermath of war had only intensified that habit to an uncomfortable pitch of unbreaking ritual of collection, put-up and take-down. Even now, in the mundanity of relatively-settled civilian life, standing in lines or sitting in waiting rooms, he’d often flip through the files on his cell phone and just  _look_  at the images that he’d captured. Like he was burning them into his memory, as if memory wasn’t just as fragile as photos fading under sunlight. 

She didn’t understand his obsession to remember, in some ways, not anymore. She had so long been acquainted with loss and the risk of loss; for years her bones had still resonated with the skittering rumble of Onibaba’s many feet, her lungs battling particles of kaiju dust and swallowed screams, her skin still encased in the rubble of her city—but her hair had faded away from the bright blue her drafting pencil left on bleak white paper, and she now felt no need to re-dye it. The revenge-lust that had driven her for nights on end to redirect jaeger coolant systems for maximum efficiency and fight for discounts and access to scrapyards had fallen away. Still, her fingers itched for a drawing board and drafting pencil when she thought too long about the entirety of her loss. 

She had inklings as to why Raleigh still carried around a small stack of photos in his pocket, and hung up portraits and landscapes and still-lives and images of sculptures and monuments that he had captured on the walls of the corner that she had given him for a clothes bureau, but she had never found a chance to ask when the probable reasons seemed so completely tainted in sorrow that stunk so much like her own, the bones of every family she’d ever lost stacked in neat layers below her feet.

They were lying together on the couch, Raleigh curled up on his side with his elbow propped up underneath him, playing a couple of different old-school mobile games from her childhood and his adolescence—Candy Crush and Temple Run by the sound effects, alternating between the two games whenever he failed a level, it seemed. Mako sat cuddled in the nest of his bent legs, treating them as the foundation for her blanket nest as she flipped idly between news reports and game shows and dramas on the television screen, whether in Japanese, English, Spanish, Russian, or Chinese—their home cable package was a little bit eclectic and very customized—although Mako had yet to be convinced to watch the Beeb (as Raleigh called the BBC) because of the slight but ever growing chance of hearing an accent painfully reminiscent of a certain East End gravel—

She flung the remote aside as soon as she landed on something en español and grabbed for the notepad in her lap.

Her fingers itched pretty terribly as the figure-eights she was doodling in concentric and ever widening patterns began to fluctuate and then fall away into tinier and tinier patterns, stretching back into the once blank space. But if she focused, the designs would became beautiful and the itch would fade.

She was brought out of her fugue by the sound of a tandem click and beep that seemed out of place for both Candy Crush and Temple Run. Raleigh had twisted around halfway onto his back and had his phone in front of his face, with a look of intense concentration.

She boggled in confusion until she remembered seeing through Yancy’s eyes the sight of his younger brother taking a photograph—not the carefree snapping of images at a party or in a crowd but what he had reserved for nature photography or the portraits of people he favored most—the photos he held onto the longest. (There was a cycle to the photo stack that he always had with him, she had noticed. Certain photos never got thrown out. Not now.)

Here they were, a few months into their reunion in New Tokyo in Mako’s flat in the suburbs, and he was taking a picture, of her.

"<What did you just take a picture of?>" she asked, knowing already but wanting him to acknowledge it. She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, suddenly realizing that her hair was screening most of her face as she leaned against him (solid, warm, a bit squishy in the hindquarters—a perfect pillow) and suddenly wasn’t so sure of what he’d actually been aiming at.

He smiled at her but then went back to frowning in thought at his phone’s screen. “You… well, your hands… I was trying to catch a clear shot of them in motion, but I’m thinking it would be easier either to record a video and grab screenshots or actually dig out the good camera. You wouldn’t stop moving, so this is pretty blurry.” He grimaced in his trademarked “this is both frustrating and confusing but I’m going to figure it out” Raleigh Becket face of measured determination. “Well, and this lens is shit, it’s not capturing the light like I want either.”

Mako chuckled at that. “What light? Like the TV’s? It’s just blue. <Nothing fancy.>”

"That’s part of what made your hands so mesmerizing." Raleigh’s voice had dropped to a familiar growl.

Mako tut-tutted. “<Calm down, you.>” (It was so hard to keep the smile off her face in this stage of the game, but so much more fun if she did.)

"<Shit, I don’t know if I can,>" he said, placing the phone on the coffee table next to the couch, although the energy contained in that movement let the phone skitter a little across the table. Mako made a mental note to buy him a rubberized phone case before setting her notepad and pencil down, letting him reach across the length of his still-curled body to hold her hands. She braced herself against the corner between the back of the couch and the armrest as she helped him pull himself up to a cross-legged position, destroying her blanket-nest. For all that he had sounded excited and aroused he was as limp and ropeless as a lazy cat. < _Languid is good, too, though. > _Mako finally let herself smile at the dorky, sleepy grin on his face as he stared down at their joined hands. He lifted her right hand and held it to his lips, just holding it, not even moving to breathe, as the grin set into a determined grit of jaw.

She stilled. He was memorizing, trying to hold this moment and petrify it in recollection. And for some reason, it scared her. Her chest tightened. “Raleigh,” she began, and her voice broke. She swallowed, kept on going. “You don’t have to worry. <I don’t want you to go.>” _< For as long as you want to stay,> _she couldn’t help adding to herself.

His eyes lifted to hers before dropping to her lips, a contentment and relaxation suffusing him, telltale signs like his hairline smoothing back a few centimeters and his smile widening as huge indicators. She suddenly realized what she had just done: answering a question, an insecurity, that he had not yet spoken out loud or perhaps hadn’t even formed into a grammatical structure, another yearning on the pile of “longings about Mako” that she knew he kept, and that she knew he was deliberately trying to avoid foisting on her unthinkingly or all at once—waiting for her signals and her timing before bringing certain subjects up verbally—< _he did learn from his mistakes >_ she thought grimly, remembering a couple of tense… discussions they’d had before she’d completely broken down years ago. He was able to read her about as well as she could read him—

 _"The Drift goes both ways,"_ echoed in her heart yet again. She had memories of that phrase spoken in Shatterdome after Shatterdome in every language she knew and a few she didn’t… but the rumble of her fathers’ voices vibrated most deeply in her heart, all of her fathers— her father before Onibaba, as he, trying to explain the news that they were listening to on the radio and how these new saviors of the world would be able to fight together, had been paraphrasing the radio announcer’s scientific jargon. She at eight years old had felt terrified and intrigued by the idea of a neural handshake and wondered how it would be to experience all of someone’s consciousness inside one’s own. Her father, in his explanation, tried to emphasize that the pilots would not be alone, that their partners would be experiencing it too, sharing the load and the burden, and even if it was scary, they could count on each other to be right there. That’s when he had picked her up off the floor where she was clinging to his pant leg and lifted her on his leg, letting her burrow into his chest. The recollection was blurry, but she imagined in that moment that her father was staring deep across the table at her mother and that she had reached a hand out to his free one as she crooned his name and his body had started shivering uncontrollably as he took Mother’s hand in his—

—the deeper rumble of Sensei’s breaking in through her haze of anger as he tried to explain the damage that a drift into uncontrollable emotion could do, in response to her demand that he list off the pros and cons of why Uncle Herc and his brat son (who were also basically family in every way) still were deciding to pilot together even though both Mako and the rest of the world, including Uncle Herc  _and_  Sensei, knew that Chuck’s abominable pride and hair-trigger temper combined with his reek of swaggering ambition and self importance had driven off all his fellow cadets in his year and  _below and above_ , even the  _desperate_  ones—

Mako and Sensei had both known what Mako was arguing for under the surface: “If you let  _him_  drift with someone, even  _Herc_ , why can’t I?!!” and Sensei had looked more and more pained, finally dropping the subject with “the Drift works both ways—Chuck has Herc to balance him out, and he is willing to do it, despite everything, for the sake of others’ safety,” and even as he said it, Mako had regretted it as Sensei’s resolve hardened against his own daughter—and it wasn’t fair that he was right—that there was no one he was willing to place in the firing zone of Mako’s long burning wrath, and he, although more than capable of absorbing and weathering it as a proven master of the drift (especially in his last fight, Mako noted with a sorrowful pride), was unable to give her this gift, this boon that Herc was granting his son, and it was not something that Mako would dare to ask of him, or even to wish it— 

—because drifting in a jaeger with the one person she loved and admired most deeply and adamantly, at the cost of his health and probably his life and the subsequent deterioration of all that he stood for and had sacrificed so much to achieve was more than Mako could even consider to ask— 

—so even if that fucking jerk Chuck could get to fight kaiju with his dad when he didn’t even deserve it, not caring that he was taking that level and complexity of emotion into the drift against his own father, she couldn’t. She couldn’t! And there were all rational and good reasons behind it but Chuck was proof that good, rational reasons couldn’t be all that was holding her back, and it rankled that they were aligned with the horrible, sharp, cruel ones that she felt constantly encroaching on her like static breaking up a weak AM broadcast—

"—you’re only a girl, you’re just so intelligent! too intelligent for the grind of battle, you are too valuable to be sent to the front, you’re still young, we could really use you in LOCCENT or here at this desk designing another weapon in case we all die and the kaiju win, we could really use you but we want to protect you, your family is long dead with the rest of Old Tokyo’s millions somewhere in the smoldering ruins, why don’t you have respect for all the people who would get revenge only if they could, stop insisting on your private, personal selfish need for vengeance, the pilots will do it for you if you send one or two of them into battle wearing your favors—why not Chuck, you’re practically siblings, he’s do the job for you creditably—"

—the static so often blatantly interrupted or just fizzled in the undertones of actual conversation with well-meaning adults in the Shatterdomes in which she grew up, but most maddening were the ubiquitous messages brought to rude reality on TV or in the movies or books that she would sink herself into, searching for stories that would encourage her, that she then would turn off or throw across the room before returning to the drawing board, pencil gripped firmly in hand.

And then she had met Raleigh. 

Someone who had actually wanted her, to fight alongside her, despite her ferocity and anger and the way she cut him down to size verbally and physically over and over before she had discovered that she could trust him, and despite the horrible memories that lived inside her skull that resonated with his own trauma, and somehow they had held each other together. 

The caution that he had learned over the previous five years had tempered her trembling eager rage that had built up imperceptibly since Onibaba, her long practice of control and steadiness buoying his spirits when everything threatened to come undone just like it had that winter day five years ago with Yancy. His encouraging voice had rung like a thousand bells in her head and in her ears as it echoed in the spaces between them, reaching to the very heart of their jaeger, his courage in the face of his obvious nerves helping to drive her own nervousness away.

Her copilot’s constant narration for LOCCENT’s benefit had helped trigger the  _look_  that Tendo had given her after their first battle, the “I knew you had it in you, kid,” smile of satisfaction. Over the years, Tendo had indulged Mako in countless Kaiju vs. Jaeger RPs over IM late at night (both silly and utterly serious battle tactics, strategies, and scenarios included), partially to keep Tendo up on night watches while simultaneously satisfying Mako’s own burning curiosity and raging need to ply every trace of his extensive knowledge of kaiju attacks. Her teenage late nights spent trying to stump him proved ever challenging, particularly as his battle experience widened with increased frequency and variety in attacks. Tendo’s approval deepened her joy of quest won and family avenged—he knew her fighting style and customary tricks and had been able to tell which were her ideas through the detailed reports.

And Raleigh had been a perfect fighting partner for her then, it seemed, as necessary as hilt is to blade or fletching is to arrow—thinking back to the haze of her first battle, in the heat of her dream finally being fulfilled, the rush of adrenaline-spiked battle concentration that demanded everything from every part of her, he had been the bedrock underneath her weak places. The horror of reliving her worst memory had lurked behind but not tainted the work that they had done together.

She shook herself before she ranged too far into recollections of their second battle or the worst of the five years that had followed, feeling like she was crawling hand over hand from sliding backward into a black cave pool of mingled regret and sorrow and resentment that seemed too deep and treacherous to spelunk today. It was more important to be with him as he lifted her right hand to his mouth again, as he kissed along her knuckles and into her palm, his other hand stroking along her upper arm as if to remind her where she was, grounding her. She scooted closer, placing her free hand on his chest near his collarbone and tracing a path down his clavicle through his shirt towards the middle, watching her hand glide down his breastbone and across the valley between nipples, catching on a nub before sweeping along the arc of his pectoral, his moans resonating in her palm and inner wrist. She leaned into her caresses, easing him down onto his back, his legs falling nerveless to each side underneath her, as he pulled her down along with him. He continued to mouth his way up and down her forearm, leaving a trail of flushed skin behind as she contentedly settled against him, edging her hips between the cradle of the two great tendons of his inner thighs, enjoying the flex of his chest under her free hand. 

She became entranced by the sight and sensation of Raleigh’s lips working over her fingertips outstretched between them, the quivering vulnerability of his neck, his half-closed eyes fluttering with her every shift in weight. From all indications, he seemed as ready as she felt. They had discovered since actually becoming lovers (all those rumors of the past having been somewhat off the mark) that their height difference made kissing a problem of craning necks and future soreness if lying down with their hips together, especially if Raleigh was the one on his back, and with his face so far away the temptation to just begin grinding down on him from her end was too real. 

Raleigh was in process of sucking on a pointer finger stained with the blue from her drafting pencil and was decidedly not helping her keep a clear head. She decided to course-check and maybe course-correct a little. 

"Hey, you wanna make out or… just get this party started?" She had to nudge him in the ribs before he paid attention enough to stop what he was doing — he was apparently just as distracted by what he was doing as she was; fixation on a certain body part wasn’t rare, which she occasionally allowed to both of their respective delights, but her hand receiving all the action wouldn’t cut it tonight. It wouldn’t be hard to redirect Raleigh’s attention, though.  _" <_What do you want to do?>” she asked, wiping his slobbery kisses off her arm onto his shirt sleeve for added emphasis. 

Her question seemed to spark an interest in him, his face visibly perking. “Oh, you should come up closer to me, right here…” he sad, patting the notch between his clavicles as an illustration of where he meant, Mako’s chin resting on his sternum being too far way for kisses. She smiled in agreement, scooting up his body in almost an army crawl, Raleigh pulling her by the one slightly moist hand that he still held. She gingerly snuggled herself around his torso, crooking her face into the curve of his neck as he wrapped his arms around her, running a hand over the nape of her neck and into her hair, the other pressing around her lower back. She shivered, hooking her arms under his and wrapping her hands over the back of his shoulders.  _< Secure.> _She felt so much  _calmer_ , less frantic, being like this, smushed up against this giant blond puppy of a… drift compatible friend… fellow warrior, companion, lover… and some of the feelings she had been fighting to push out of conscious thought blew out in a sigh.

He was solid, he was warm, and his heart was beating in tandem with hers.

Raleigh let out a heavy breath, enough to stir her hair.”<You’re finally  _here_  with me, Mako. You’ve been… somewhere else all evening.>” He paused, like he was searching for words. “<A lot more staring off into space than usual. You ok?>”

She frowned, realizing as she did that his arms around her were relaxing in response to her tension. “<Just… thinking. And missing a lot… of people. Things.>”

He dipped his head against hers, chuckling. “I’d  _noticed,_  because you had the TV on, which is weird in and of itself, and you flipped through three of your favorite shows and then settled on what looked like a Lima local news channel? I didn’t even know we could get that.”

Mako tried not to stiffen as she shunted away the thought of  _< Because Sensei’s Spanish was never that good>_, and began nibbling at the bit of neck right under her mouth. “There’s… interesting stuff happening in Lima right now,” she said, interspersing her words with kisses and nips, “…some local firms with former Lima SD staff are working on adapting technologies developed during the Kaiju War for commercial use—”

"So… you were actually listening, …not just …blanking out… doodling?" Raleigh’s edge of incredulity still carried over his increasing breathiness.

"Hmmm." She began drifting her mouth towards his jaw.

"You—you’re so… smart, Mako. You… know that… right? Clever… brilliant…" It came out between whimpers.

"No,  _you’re_  brilliant. If a bit prickly.” Which didn’t stop her from sucking at the underside of his chin. The space between his adam’s apple and his jawbone was particularly tender.

"I’ll shave tomorrow… morning… once—I can—stand again—" he groaned.

She decided to stop teasing him, sliding a knee over to the other side of his body for leverage and straddling his waist, in order to better bend over his mouth and kiss the ever-living daylights out of him. Not that it would actually shut him up beyond the use of coherent words. 

But tonight both of them were not quite as usual, Raleigh seeming quieter, slower to respond, although just as tender and warm as always. She was kissing hard, the coiled force of her body arcing from her knees and pelvis straight to his mouth, and he was receiving it, his hands clinging in a desperate yet gentle grasp to loose folds of her shirt falling away from her body, or ghosting over her back and sides. The thought struck her —nurturing— Mako’s life had been full of nurturing men when she had passed through the hardest trials, but Raleigh’s very core seemed to be that of giving, and endlessly accepting. He had a lot of reason to be closed off, but he rarely did, not in front of her. And here he was, trembling underneath her mouth’s touch like she was feeding him the elixir of the heavens, gasping when she let him up for air and moaning her name like it was hallowed, an invocation for mercy.

It was endlessly flattering to be made to feel like a goddess.

She pulled away from him once again, panting along with him before catching her breath. “<Ok, let’s move this to the bedroom. Do you think you could walk?>”

Raleigh looked as glazed over as she had seen him in a long time, but he was able to nod. She nuzzled his cheek as he began collecting himself. 

"Jeeze, Mako, I just… wow." He straightened his legs and then shifted them, letting them fall from the couch to the floor. "When I said that I hoped I’d be able to walk in the morning, that wasn’t a  _challenge._ " He grinned hard if a bit sloppily. 

Mako couldn’t help smiling back, feeling more than a little feral. She brushed the back of her hand against the side of his chin. “Carry me to bed.” She placed her arms around his neck and leaned her head on his right shoulder, looking up at him.

He heaved himself (and her along with him) forward into a sitting position. “If I drop you, it’s your fault, though.”

"<You won’t drop me. I trust you.>"

He gathered his arms around her as she gripped her legs and locked ankles behind his back. Then, he pushed upwards, walking with a slight stagger that despite everything—her weight, his previous languidity, their mutual blissed-out state—sped up once they passed the living room door through the hall to Mako’s bedroom (specifically still hers since Raleigh’s name wasn’t on the lease). Mako clung to him as they jounced along, jolts of pleasure shooting up through her abdomen.

At the door he paused to open it with one hand, fumbling with the handle before Mako started sliding down his body, yelping in protest, so instead he reestablished his hold on her and in one motion nudged the door handle down with one knee and used the weight of their bodies to push open the door. There was a moment where Mako felt herself flying, falling, and then he stopped, his hands wrapping further around her and his arms hard as steel bands. She tilted her head further to the side on his shoulder to try to get a read on him. 

His voice came out gruffly before she could interpret his expression. “I’m going to set you down. And then close the door.” He didn’t move to do either of those things.

It was after another beat that she realized that he was waiting from an answer from her, and so she nodded. She lifted her head and straightened her torso inside his embrace as he, upon reaching the bed, bent forward to set her down. He turned back to the door, Mako scooting up to sit on the edge of the bed, staring down at her hands curling in her lap as her whole body seemed to heat, trembling with energy, and she could have sworn that her core, somewhere in the spaces between pelvis and spine and ribcage, was pulsing and glowing like an nuclear reactor in anticipation.

She looked up, wondering what was taking Raleigh so long. Was she going to have to drag him over here?

He was leaning against the now closed door, staring at her, gripping a leg of his boxers in one hand, a slight tremor in his other as he ran it down his face. She started. It was frightening and confusing to see him wracked in this sort of trembling, near-ecstasy-near-pain mixture of outward bodily signs that signified something she felt just as inadequate to interpret as she had the strange look on his face from before. Mako’s heart chilled with the notion that she had never seen Raleigh like this before. Not in real-meat-space life, in the brief fleshly existence with him before she had driven him away for those five years, nor from the information gathered while experiencing directly the brush and meld (mesh) of his consciousness in the drift at the very beginning of them—and Yancy had never seen him like this either. She had nothing to go on but what she already knew, and this was an outlier. What felt like a terrifyingly significant outlier.

She placed her left hand on the bed, feeling just as trembly as Raleigh looked, like the force of a live current—of desire and apprehension and confusion and curiosity but mostly just wanting him to be next to her rather than so far away—was running through her, and leaned back on the hand a little, causing her back to arch a little, just a little. She saw him see her do it, his lips slackening.

"Raleigh." His name slipped out of her mouth unexpectedly but not unwittingly, the desire to call his name at last building up past her hesitation regarding whatever the hell was going on.

At her summons, he approached, finally. She let out a sigh of relief. Halfway across from her he slowed his already measured pace and then, a few steps away, he dropped to his knees and shuffled the rest of the short way to her, his eyes cast sheepishly this way and that between cautious flicks up to her face and down to her collar. Like he was approaching a… sacred place. He knelt before her. His breath was coming out in shaky, tiny puffs onto her bare legs, stirring the tiny hairs on her thighs not covered by her lounge shorts. The pulse in her belly thrummed insistently harder, making her ache.

But it seemed that tonight Raleigh was just as prone to being overcome by his own internal processes as Mako had been earlier. His face was hovering over the surface of her lap, achingly close, his hands at his sides, his back spreading in a glorious arc before her. Chills went up her spine, setting to trembling the hand curled palm-up in her lap. She wanted to touch him, run her fingers through his limp, light hair and pull him in between her thighs, but the utter concentration of his form and the stillness of the moment and her wonder at what he could possibly be thinking were like bindings on her hands and a muzzle on her mouth. She waited.

After a minute, like he was pulling long chains out of the sea, Raleigh lifted his arms from dangling at his side, a long sigh escaping, his breath’s touch sending the muscles of Mako’s thighs twitching. His hands, above but not touching hers, trembled in space, extending like a pauper’s for alms. He lifted his head, a pleading look of all peaked eyebrows and forehead and trembling lips, but with unwavering eyes he at last met her gaze. She felt like she had been stunned, a vastness of salt seas looming behind her.

He grunted, clearing his throat. “Can I ask you something?”

She forced her right hand to move from its curl of seeming-paralysis out of the charged space under his hands hovering over her lap, then lifted it to stroke an eyebrow, smoothing out his creases. He let escape a shuddering breath as she pulled her hand away again, letting it fall to the bed before she nodded. “Of course.”

Raleigh looked down at his hands as if he’d forgotten what he’d done with them, which perhaps he had, but he merely turned them over, so his palms faced Mako’s lap, intensifying the field between them. She firmly pressed her free hand over them, guiding them onto a thigh and ending that oddity of a gesture.

"I realized— I want… Can I take your picture? Like, really take it. Do a lot of photos, a series, or something?" He swallowed again. "You don’t have to say yes." His mouth worked like he wanted to say something more, or that it was uncomfortably dry, or both. 

Swirling contradictory thought spirals of  _< he’s preparing to leave> <he wants to stay> <does he think that this is a compliment?> <but it is a compliment> _and constant echoes of  _< why?> _reverberating through her skull and—saddest of all—  _< I’m not Yancy> _destroyed her composure and she choked back a sob. “<Can I ask you why you want to, first?>” Mako forced herself to meet his eyes, startling yet again to see a wide-eyed look of confusion that was building into a sense of bewildered betrayal. Raleigh visibly deflated, shrinking into himself before her eyes, although he didn’t actually move. 

"<Why?>" he repeated in a deadened tone, flinching as he said it, tension spreading from his face into his shoulders that were steadily bunching up towards his ears, like his body was attempting to stop further words from reaching his auditory canals. He flicked tongue over lips as he mumbled the question again, drawing Mako’s eye even as her stomach twisted into a knot. She blushed, in shame over the resistance that she was offering to what suddenly seemed such a small request _< but then why is he on his knees begging for it?>_ but with a part of her heart rising in defiance because it was her  _right_ to know why. 

"<I’m not going to become an artifact of your life unless I know why I’ll be hanging on your wall, Raleigh.>" It sounded harsher than her usual bluntness, even to her. She tried to lighten the mood. "<Is it a  _weird_ reason?>” 

At that, Raleigh blushed too. “<N-no, I promise. It’s not.>” His tension melted a bit as he grinned that loopy half-smile, looking down to his hands gathered under hers in her lap. “<I mean, you’d be  _great_ for that—if you ever wanted to, I mean—but that’s not why.>”

She tossed her head, dismissing that thought, and gathered her courage. “<Would it be for the same reason that you have one of Yancy?”> As she said it, she realized that of course that hadn’t been the original reason, but still she had to gulp around the lump in her throat. “<To… memorialize me?>” 

On this side of loss in the midst of too many quickly fading but no less painful memories, the thought clung with stubborn claws.  _< In case I’m ever gone too?> _It’s what she was tempted to do. But doing it seemed like it would tempt fate.

Raleigh was clearly struggling with his answer but it was obvious that she hadn’t actually hit anywhere near whatever his answer was. His mouth worked like a gasping fish fresh out of water as he figured out how to start. A hand of his had crept forward and found the knob of her left hip bone, massaging it with his thumb. He drew breath and met her eyes again. “<I… just want to. I want to… because you’re beautiful, you’re so great, and talented, and smart,> and you look good no matter what you’re doing or wearing… it’s like you don’t even have to try to catch my attention… cameras love you, I can just tell…” 

She couldn’t help a small smile at his adoring babble.

He continued. “…but I guess what I really want to do is try to show you what I see when I look at you. To show you, and whoever would look at them, why… why I’m going to stay by your side… <for as long as you’ll let me.>”

She grimaced a little. “<I’m not going to be young forever, or beautiful.>”

"<Hah, you’re always going to be younger than me, anyway. And definitely more beautiful. You’ve always been too good for me.>"

"<Damned flatterer.>" 

"<I mean it, though. Really. But that’s not even the point. You’re… important.>" 

The words “<to me>” hung unspoken between them. They didn’t really need to be said. Just like the word “love” didn’t have to be. They’d known for a long time that they loved each other, ever since upon breaking the ocean’s surface on a too-bright cloudless day they’d realized through their ghost-drift that the other was the most precious remnant both of them had left, although whether that operated functionally as family or lovers had been something to be determined with time. 

If “love” ever passed out loud between them without an impending orgasm driving Raleigh’s mouth, it wouldn’t change that much. Letting Raleigh take a photo series of her seemed, to the part of her that was aware of how deep a cavern the fear of commitment and accompanying risk of loss ran, even more vulnerable and binding than words, if it were possible.

Mako let herself stroke some of his lank hair back over an ear before responding. “<Well, as long as it’s not a weird fetish thing, or a sad ritualized preparation to leave or something creepy to remember me after I die, it’s fine.>” His entire being brightened as he lunged forward in excitement but she threw a stiff hand to his forehead before he could get off his knees. “<I mean it. I want to potentially be able to hang these pictures up in public.  _Tasteful._ >” She raised an eyebrow. “< _Not nude. >”_

Undeterred, he grinned, ducking his head down away under her block, with one hand creeping up the inside of her thigh and the other having already made it all the way up to her torso, palming her belly under her shirt. 

Mako sighed. “Why do I suspect that I’m only talking to air right now.”

He didn’t deny it, his mouth already nibbling a trail up her leg behind the wandering hand. “I get it, Mako, no nude pics. More important than that is—” He paused for another press of lip to leg. “—I gotta go down on you first.” He sucked at a quivering hollow of muscle. “Immediately, please?”

She smiled like her heart would break, laying back onto the bed and grabbing at his head, and pulled him closer. “Permission granted."


End file.
